Was Anthony Joshua The Loser From The Fury Vs. Wilder Fight?

If you are a casual boxing fan then you have probably been more involved with the sport over the past few weeks. It’s exciting times inside and outside the ring. The recent bout between the WBC champ Deontay Wilder and Tyson Fury was a classic. A bout that went the distance and was dramatic and controversial. It had everything. Knockdowns, misread cards, questionable refereeing. The whole 9 yards.

Should The gypsy king have won?

The history books will have it as a draw and ordinarily of a fighter suffers two knockdowns they would lose. However, the consensus seems to be that Fury was robbed of a victory. With respected former pros such as Lennox Lewis claiming that he was undone by hometown advantage. Tyson even seemed to have the back up of his US namesake, and boxing icon “iron” Mike Tyson. As for the fans, the opinion seems divided dependant on which side of the pond they originate from. But let’s look at some of the talking points from the fight.

The scorecard

Admittedly this had no bearing on the result of the match but one of the scorecards had the wrong total at the bottom. It was 2 points out. The weird thing about that is that the cumulative total was correct. It didn’t affect the result either way but was still an interesting side note.

Should Wilder have scored a knockout?

There is no doubt that after the punch that put Tyson down for the second time in the bout that we all thought he was done. Yet somehow he managed to beat the count and force the bout to be decided on points. Should this have been the case? Should the bronzed bomber have claimed a knockout? Well, probably not but the referee has been accused of a slow count which deprived the champ of retaining cleanly.

All the talk

As with any boxing bout, there was trash talk beforehand. However, it never got really nasty and both men seemed pretty respectful and mooted a rematch. After such an enthralling clash of styles, I’m sure many would pay to see it. Oddly most of the trash talk over the past few months has been involving British favourite, Anthony Joshua. Recently Fury called out AJ and basically said that the two will never fight and he intimated that was because Joshua doesn’t want that fight. He then promptly blocked AJ on Twitter. The old hit and run! And of course, there has been lots of talk about a title unification match between AJ who holds the other three world titles and Wilder who holds the most prestigious. With AJ’s popularity, that would be a money bout and it certainly seems like the fight AJ and his promoter Eddies Hearn are after.

So what comes next?

Well here’s the thing it seems like the biggest loser after this recent match was Joshua. He had a title fight pencilled in for next April against Wilder and had Deontay have stopped Fury in convincing fashion it would look like that fight would be a shoo-in to happen. But the closeness of the fight means that a rematch may be in the offing putting the clash with AJ on the backburner. Although just to throw a spanner in the world, Fury’s promoter Frank Warren has challenged AJ to a battle of Britain. Fury Versus AJ is certainly a fight we would all love to see, but imagine how much better that fight would be if AJ could wrestler the WBC belt from wilder previous to it? Two of Britains best heavyweights with all the gold on the line? Now that’s a dream match if there ever was one.